


I Pity You, I Pity Me

by Carbocat



Series: The Skeletons of Life [1]
Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy
Genre: Head Injury, Memory Loss, Non-Graphic Violence, Pierre & Anatole: Canon Divergent, Pining, Seizures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-11 18:10:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11719734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbocat/pseuds/Carbocat
Summary: Pierre did not deprive himself of the pleasure of smashing Anatole’s head in nor were the consequences of his actions deprived from him or anybody else.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It is important to note that I employed a healthy amount of TV Logic when it came to Anatole's injuries so if you're looking for medical accuracy, this is probably not the fic for you. Overall, this fic is not depressing as this first chapter seems or really, depressing at all. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy.

_What, what don’t-_

There was red in his eyes.

There was screaming, and blood, and Hélène’s deep red fingernails digging into the seam of his jacket. There was pulling, and shoving, and red splattering warm across his face with every hit, after hit, after hit, after scream. _Stop, stop, oh god, you’re going to kill him!_

He stopped, an ache in his muscle and labor in his breath. He stopped and all that was left was broken and red.

The paperweight fell numbly from his hand to the desk top with a heavy thud and he backed away, _no_. His glasses speckled with red, with blood. _Oh, god._

There was red on his papers, splashed against the wallpaper, seeping and congealing in between the pages of his books. Red staining and matting feathery blond hair, pooling in a puddle on the desk. It was too much, there was too much red. Pierre felt sick.

“What have I done?”

“Get help, please, get help. Somebody-“

There were tears and sobs, and nothing glamorous or charming about it. There were soft hands made bloody and gentle words for deaf ears – _hush, hush, Anatole, I’m here –_ and it all felt so wrong.

It didn’t make sense. Hélène never cried.

Hélène was stoicism and statuesque the way that Greeks carved marble, the way her father had been before her and the way Anatole never would. Hélène did not bother with petty emotions unless there was something in it for her, she cared little for the wayward ways of people like her brother (except for, of course, her brother). Hélène was calculated and smart, and most of all, Hélène did not cry.

She did not cry when her favorite of the horses had been put down, did not weep when a bear tore into the neighboring house and then into the neighbors. There was no whimper on their wedding day, no wobble of her lip when months later, they played loving husband and wife to appease her fever-ridden mother.

She did not sigh or snivel, did not get misty once as her mother’s fever grew worse. She sunk into the snow and put supportive arms around her brother’s shaking shoulders, let his sobs wet her collar and kept her eyes dry on the cold morning they laid their dear mother to rest.

She did not shed a tear when she left her mourning family behind for Moscow, not even a tear of joy when Anatole followed a year later.

There was a war going on, Hélène would say, she had no time for tears.

“Oh, god, I didn’t – I never meant to-“

The blood was black against ghostly pale skin in the moonlight seeping through the small windows, broken and seeping. Staining the satin of her dress, dirtying the diamonds lining her fingers and the pearls around her neck as she used her body to shield the prone figure, still draped halfway across the desk, from him. There was too much blood, too much.

Pierre scrubbed his blood-sticky hands venomously against his trousers, needing it off, needing – needing… His step forward was shoved back by a hand curled into the breast of his shirt, “Stay away from him, you monster!”

Hélène’s wit was sharper than any sword, her anger even more so but this. The break in her voice and these words so biting and afraid was not a clean cut, no quick execution. This, like grounding glass into wounds, hurt worse than any sword. “Oh god, Anatole.”

“You’ve done enough, Pierre,” She hissed, ruining her dress even more as she pressed the satin and sheer gently against the torn skin. There was too much blood, it was soaked through in moments.

He numbly shed his jacket, offering the coarse fabric but she slapped his hand away and hissed, “Don’t touch him, don’t!”

The air was stifling in the study, stuffy with copper, booze, and the smoke of extinguished candles. Polluted with noise, his own heavy breathing and her wracking sobbed words of comfort, _it’ll be okay, Anatole. It’ll be okay, Brother. Just open your eyes, please. For me, Anatole. Wake up for me, Anatole, please. For me?_

Anatole did not make a sound, did not move. There was too much blood.

“I never meant to.”

“Leave,” She seethed through teeth and tears, glaring with open fire in her eyes and hate below the surface. “Don’t stand there, Pierre, _idiot husband._ Leave and send help, _NOW!_ ”

 

 

He wasn’t supposed to survive.

Pierre returned with the only doctor he knew, a trusted old friend that came without question. The doctor took one look at the blood seeping into the carpet and Hélène cradling Anatole’s head like he was made of eggshell and asked, “What happened?”

“He fell,” Hélène answered for them both and then to the doctor’s skeptical look, “Twice. We will pay you handsomely to stop your inane questioning and help him.”

Almost as an afterthought, seeping from a crack in her façade that reminded Pierre just how young his wife still was, she added helplessly, “Please.”

Pierre thought, as Hélène was ushered away to make room for the doctor to work and how she made it only so far as to collapse into his arms, of all those tales that her mother had spun during their engagement. Hélène, the level head with eyes like her father. Hélène, her darling strong daughter.

And Anatole. Anatole, that stupid child, she called so fondly, such a pretty naïve little boy. Such a perfect little boy, her golden child, so charming with his grin and bow.

Pierre had only wanted the letter, he told himself as the remains of Hélène’s composure crumbled. He only wanted an admission of guilt from a man that never admitted fault, he told himself as he practically carried her from the room. He just wanted the responsibility of the evening to be taken by its rightful owner, he told himself as he readied a cup of tea.

He wanted – he wanted blood, he’d never admit it.

He wanted Anatole to feel pain, for his adolescent ideals of what love was to crack into real heartache. He wanted to pull that perfume head out of the clouds, to shake that damn child until he saw the repercussions of his actions.

He wanted blood, wanted to hurt his pretty face. To take pleasure in bashing – _no. no, he didn’t. no, he didn’t. no, he didn’t._

He just wanted the letters.

He wanted to get to the bottom of how this all got so far out of hand, to make Anatole see that he was ruining a young girl’s life, _had_ ruined. He wanted to help Natasha, he never had any intention of-

Hélène dumped the tea into his lap, she paced the hall. She threw things, mostly at him, and cursed his every move. He said nothing.

It was an hour later, with every stitch and bandage in place and Anatole cleaned and carried to his bed, when the doctor spoke. His voice was plain and blunt, a small mercy for his news was grave, _I would say your goodbyes tonight for Anatole Kuragin will be in the next life by morning._

He wasn’t expected to survive, wasn’t supposed to but he had.

Shallow complexion and a whistling wheeze of breath carried on the morning air, haunting the halls of their sleepless manor. It could almost have been mistaken for sleep.

Hélène had vocalized that when the sun peaked hesitantly over the horizon. Pierre had not responded, just sat watching the rise and fall of Anatole’s bare chest from his chair by the door. Waiting, waiting for the fall that didn’t rise, for the wheeze to choke off into silence, for death. Waiting for them to finish this descent into ruin.

They sent word to the doctor and he arrived surprised but not hopeful. In that same plain tone, he told them to not look for hope in small miracles for they were only brief reprieves from the inevitable. It would be unlikely that he would wake, “The damage was extensive.”

“Yes, it was.”

“I apologize that I cannot offer you better news, Countess.”

“I know.”

Anatole’s violin was taken from his study and propped up against the bed with care, paper and ink and a book half-finished were sat at the foot of the bed. Hélène fluffed pillows, readjusted furs so they covered over his feet the way Anatole liked. She carefully wrapped one of his arms around a tasseled pillow, just like he was sleeping.

They could believe it, listening to the shallow breathing. They could believe that he was asleep and the night was nothing more than a nightmare. They could, if they allowed themselves that much.

Hélène smiled in the glow of the morning light through the half-drawn curtains, it was a hollow brittle thing, “Charming, dear brother.”

Pierre spoke from his chair by the door, “You cannot allow-“

“Allow me my hope, _husband_ ” – The word was a vile and wretched thing, ripped from her lips like it was too disgusting to keep – “you already took my brother from me. Allow me this.”

She sighed aloud in the silence when there was nothing else she could fiddle with before she rifled through the pile of Anatole’s discarded clothes on the floor. She pulled a bundle of letters from the inner pocket of his vest and then tossed them on the floor at Pierre’s feet, “These were what you were yelling about, yes?”

Pierre picked up the letters, they seemed unimportant in reflection, “I apologize.”

“Don’t.”

“Why did you say that he fell?” He asked. “Why am I not in shackles this very second and being lead to the prisons? You do not love me, respect me, why protect me?”

“There is enough scandal already,” She stated calmly, her eyes not leaving the rise and fall of her brother’s chest. She reached blindly for one of his cold hands, encompassing it in both of hers. “We will not survive anymore.”

Pierre downcast his eyes to the figure in the bed as well, taking in the slim waist and nimble hands, the stillness of such a bountiful man. It was horrible feeling, “I never imagined him this small outside of that ridiculous jacket.”

“Anatole is all perfume hair and handsome eyes,” She replied, smiling sadly. “He is little without it but he is Anatole. He is strong when he wants to be.”

Unwaveringly stubborn and strong-willed in the face of reason, he thought she meant. Manipulative and smart in a way no one expects from him, in just the same way that she was, the way their father was, when he wanted to be.

“Pierre,” She said after another sigh, smoothing out the wrinkles in her ruined dress with her hands still red with dried blood before standing from her place at the corner of the bed. She stared into his eyes and the guilt behind them as she continued, “Dolokhov is coming for breakfast in three hours. Leave this house, husband, and do not come back or I will allow him to shoot you.”

“I am not going anywhere so I will die.”

“No, you won’t,” She said in the commanding voice of her father’s. “I will not allow any more blood to be shed in this house, now go.”

 

 

Pierre left.

He moved into a ground floor room at the Inn and he ignored all the pitied glances and whispered words of the gossips. He ignored the inquires behind his back as to why sad old Pierre Bezukhov was not staying in his own house. The current gossip was that Hélène had not been pleased with him shooting her lover.

They took pity. He ignored it.

He took only that which he had been able to carry the morning he left, his books and his notes, and found the rest of his things dumped in the snow on his doorstep a week later. It fueled the gossips more.

It was not long after that that a gun was pressed into the small of his back upon returning from speaking with Audrey, his pocket heavy with letters, “My purse is empty.”

“Open the door.”

Pierre complied with the gruff voice when the muzzle was pushed uncomfortably into his spine, letting the door swing open on its hinges, and allowed himself to be shoved inside. He could not find it in him to be surprised by Dolokhov standing in the doorway, nor by the gun unnervingly steady in his hand, “You have come to challenge me to a duel?”

“I’ve come to shoot you dead,” He replied. There was a rage in his voice and his eyes, the kind that warmed you better than any fur coat but it burnt, and it hurt, and it required kindling to keep it lit. Dolokhov’s fire was fading, helpless cold seeping into his features.  He’d come to add Pierre to the fire, “I was gathering the funds to take him to Petersburg the next day, you did not have to _beat_ him.”

As far as the rest of Moscow was concerned, Dolokhov _did_ take Anatole to Petersburg and he was currently licking his wounds in the comfort of his father’s castle. He wondered briefly if it was he or Hélène that started that rumor.

“I know.”

“You will not fight then?” He asked, jabbing the gun into Pierre’s large chest. “Not defend yourself like a man.”

Pierre let the weight on his shoulders slump them, “I will not. I was monstrous and hideous, I should not have raised my fist.”

“Aye, it was more than a fist, wasn’t it?”

The weight of his guilt slumped his shoulders forward even more, managing to make such a large man look smaller and pathetic. Dolokhov sneered, he would not take pity on this man, “I will not miss this time.”

“I know.”

Pierre’s eyes fluttered shut when the barrel of the gun was pressed into his cheek and then against his forehead. He listened for the click of the trigger but heard nothing before a letter was pinned to his chest with a hard fist. The gun was gone.

His eyes snapped open, feeling as if his heart dropped into his gut and his legs turned to water, as Dolokhov holstered his gun and sneered at him, “I will not rescue you from your guilt even with a bullet. You are not _worth_ it.”

“I-“ Pierre stumbled forward without the weight of the fist against his chest before scrambling to catch the letter that fluttered between them.

Dolokhov’s voice was low and haunted when he spoke, “Anatole is awake, he wishes to see you tomorrow.”

“What?”

But Dolokhov was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

Hélène opened the door, surprise coloring her face before settling into realization with a glare, “Dolokhov gave you the letters.”

“Letters?” He asked, pulling the folded paper from his pocket. “Just the one. Has he – has he sent more than one?”

“Anatole is not having visitors,” She said instead of an answer but did nothing to stop him from stepping out of the cold and into the front hall. “Anatole is not here.”

“Chasing little girls in Petersburg, I’ve heard,” He replied, holding the letter back up awkwardly. “He asked for me.”

“He doesn’t know what he wants.”

“He isn’t a child, Hélène.”

“You beat him like one,” She hissed, stabbing an accusing finger into his chest. “You will only upset him.”

“He _asked_ for me.”

“You will upset me then.”

“I need to apologize.”

“No, you don’t,” She stopped herself from saying more with a sharp intake of breath, it was the only indication that something wasn’t quite right. Something was wrong. She rolled her eyes in annoyance or disgust with his concern, Pierre could never tell. “It is not a good time, Pierre. Go away.”

 

 

A woman dressed in a wait staff uniform rushed down the hall and passed him on the stairs, barely giving him a second glance other than to quickly curtsy. She was wearing a frustrated look on her face and a kind of soup on her chest as she continued down the stairs, Hélène had sighed but said nothing.

She said nothing as they walked down the hall, said nothing of the loud echo of struggling and curses getting louder with every step taken, and then finally, “Lunch is not a good time.”

“Why not?”

She did not have to answer, a spoon hit the wood of the open door, followed by the sound of something shattering inside the room. Hélène swooped down and picked it up, “Brother, you have a visitor.”

The scene in front of Pierre shocked him into a dim silence and he missed the rest of Hélène’s words. The relief of seeing Anatole alive and awake, sitting up with the aid of half a dozen pillows, was grand but short-lived.

It was not his still so, so almost corpse-like paleness that shook Pierre to his core. He was not shocked by the sickly remains of bruises yet faded or the stitches still hidden behind heavy bandaging, no. It wasn’t even the dazed unfocused look in his eyes that fazed him.

It was the light blue tunic.

Ill-fitted and spotted with what looked to be less of a soup and more like a porridge, dripping from the corners of his mouth and down the column of his throat as Dolokhov held strong to the base of his neck and tipped a bowl to his lips, smearing across his cheek as he turned away. There was a protested attempt to remove Dolokhov’s grip and then a clumsy jab that sent the bowl overturning into the other man’s lap, “No Fe’ya, no, ugh.”

His words broke off into broken syllables and frustrated grunts until the hand was off his neck and Dolokhov cursed, ‘Damn it, Anatole, you have to eat something!”

Hélène rolled her eyes and cleared her throat, making sure her cold eyes were trained solely on Dolokhov’s even as her voice was oddly light, “Anatole, Pierre got your letter. He has come to visit.”

Dolokhov had the decency to avert his eyes and look slightly abashed while Anatole stopped his fussing, face brightening before squinting. He glared down at the mess on his shirt, the blanket, and Dolokhov. Hélène seemed to understand what wasn’t said because she pushed Pierre out of the room and closed the door behind her.

They ignored the thumps, and grunts, and ‘damn it, just let me help you, you fool’ form the other side of the door. They stood in awkward silence until Hélène brought up the bandages Pierre’s eyes had been drawn to, “The doctor cut his hair when he put the stitches in, I do not want him to see it yet.”

Pierre nodded, having nothing to add so he changed the topic, “His speech seems a little-“

“Off?” She asked. “It is, as is his coordination which is why he needs help with food. That appears to be something that happens when your brother-in-law tries to beat you to death with a statue bear.”

He looked away, shame burning his face, but she continued, “Dr. Kuznetsov says that it might be temporary, it might not be. Don’t mention it.

Anatole was a proud man, crafted to near perfection first by his mother and then in front of mirrors every morning. Every word, every action was selected to make him more desirable, to make him perfect. Pierre could not imagine the blow to his ego that would be, “Does he…speak?”

“Yes, slowly,” She answered long after he thought that she wasn’t going to. “You have to be patient with him, he will – there have been better days.”

Pierre opened his mouth to speak but the bedroom door was pulled open by Dolokhov, standing in trousers clearly built for a much taller man. The bed was stripped of its top layer and Anatole was in a more presentable state, he even smiled something slightly lopsided and free of malice.

“P-Pierre, old man,” He said, grinning. Pierre watched his eyes jump to Hélène and then to Dolokhov before returning to him. “Sit, pl-please.”

Pierre took the seat that Dolokhov abandoned, wondering if this was an act to ease him into comfort before they struck him for his betrayal but he shook the thought from his mind. Dolokhov was too honorable, Anatole was not confrontational and in no position to be anyways, and Hélène would not show her cruelty in front of her brother.

He noticed first that the porridge had not been cleaned from the floor very well and second, one of Anatole’s pupils was much larger than the other, unfocused and dilated. Pierre’s mouth went dry.

He also noticed how Hélène draped herself across the foot of the bed and Dolokhov dragged another chair over to the opposite side. They were not going to leave him alone with him and Pierre didn’t exactly blame them, “You look better, Anatole.”

There was a sharp nod and his eyes glanced to his sister’s and then back to Pierre, there was a question in them. Hélène sighed and then stated, “Tell Anatole that we are not arguing. He has it in his silly little head that your absence has to do with me.”

Pierre’s face twisted into surprise, “Of course not, Anatole.”

“Me, then?” He asked, the words bobbing in his throat before coming out more mangled than he had intended. Anatole scowled at his shaking hands in his lap, biting his lip before speaking again, slower, “My f-fault?”

“Where did you get that idea?”

Another glance around the room but no one came to his aid and frustration passed along his feature before smoothing out into a rather serious look. He was hesitant when he spoke, “The – the accident. Ang’y, with me?”

“What?” He asked. “Accident?”

Another nodded and suddenly the floor was very interesting to the two others in the room. Pierre’s eyes narrowed, “How did you get hurt, Anatole?”

“My horse, threw me,” He answered confidently and Pierre felt cold fill his veins. Anatole seemed to pick up on that fact immediately because doubt flooded his features, “Right?”

“That’s what you remember,” came Hélène’s diplomatic response, so much like her father that it was terrible and awful. “Then it must’ve happened.”

Anatole nodded, no confidence in it but he seemed to take comfort in the finality in his sister’s voice, too trusting in the bond between them to never question if it could be used against him.

Pierre avoided his eyes when they were turned back to him, busying himself with cleaning his glasses on his shirt before echoing hollowly, “It has happened.”

It _had_ happened, once.

Pierre could almost hear the words of their mother whispered into his ear as she recounted the time her dear darling son’s horse had been startled by a mouse in the barn and Anatole had been thrown from his saddle. He broke his arm then, Pierre remembered being told, he’d been twelve.

Hélène accepted Anatole’s nod at its face value and verged the conversation onto a different track, a false one, “Pierre has been dealing with an ailing friend.”

“What friend?”

“…Andrey Bolkonsky,” He lied after a moment, using the first and only name he could think of. Hélène and Dolokhov both sent a glare his way, he felt the cold in his veins curl into his stomach. This all felt wrong.

Anatole’s eyes lit with recognition and then fell into a solemn nod, “He okay?”

“He, uh, will be,” He nodded and Anatole grinned. Pierre noticed for the first time that there was a chip in one of his teeth. He wondered if he was the cause of it.

Up close, the bruises were more vivid, fading from black and blue into purple and sickly yellow. The dusting of facial hair and the dark circles beneath his eyes gave him a haggard look. His skin was pale and flush all at once, hollowing at his cheekbones, “You really should try to eat.”

 

Anatole insisted that they go to his study after exactly three bites of toasted bread. Hélène insisted that they didn’t.

She won out in the end but the battle was hard fought with puppy eyes, pouty lips, and all the things that Hélène was immune to. Anatole fell asleep rather than accept defeat, hands still twitching in his lap.

“They do that,” Dolokhov said as Hélène left with the dishes, removing some of the pillows behind Anatole so he wasn’t slumped over. “His hands, it’s nerve damage apparently. He hasn’t touched his violin since waking up. He was a skilled musician.”

“I know.”

“Violin, piano,” He continued. “Have you heard him on the cello?”

“Once.”

“I don’t think you will again,” He concluded, tone so bitter and harsh that it juxtaposed heavily with how gentle he was tucking Anatole within the sheets. He laid an extra blanket over his feet because they got cold. “He doesn’t remember but you took that pleasure from him.”

There was something like anger, a rush of hot rage that melted the feeling of ice in his gut. Pierre would not be insulted in his own house, especially not by the man that failed to shoot him twice now. “He ruined a young girl’s life. Nat-“

“He does not remember her either,” Dolokhov stated plainly, a simple fact. That was a punishment in itself, Pierre thought as Dolokhov continued, “If we are unable to be angry over the mistakes you made that he cannot remember than I think you are capable of the same.”

“Why is that?” He asked. “Why deliver the letter, Hélène certainly didn’t want you to. Why let me through the door. Surely, I have proven that I am capable of horrid things.”

“You have and she didn’t but Anatole is my friend and you are his,” He replied. “The doctor has no idea what is permanent and what will fade, would you want to be the one to tell him that it was his ‘friend’ that did this horrible thing to him? I would not either.”

“You are lying to him.”

“For his own good.”

“Shouldn’t he decide that?”

Dolokhov’s smile was hollow and joyless, and he seemed suddenly so much older when he spoke. It sounded almost like a challenge, “You are free to tell him the details yourself. I will not stop you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everybody that commented, left kudos, and bookmarked!


	3. Chapter 3

Pierre took his leave before Anatole woke.

He did not say any goodbyes on his way to the door but he imagined that they all sighed easier when it closed behind him.

He went back to the Inn, back to his books and his studies, and he tried to put it all behind him. He tried to tell himself that he was not that man that did that horrible thing, that he had been possessed with the anger in that moment. That he was a good man.

He was _not_ a good man, but decent? He could be. He could try.

If he owned up to his own misdoings and mistakes, he could be a decent man. If he took responsibility for his raised hands and closed fists and accepted whatever fate that may lay ahead, he could be a decent man. His hands were too bloody to be good.

It was wrong to keep the truth from Anatole, it was wrong to deny him the guilt for how effectively he ruined Natasha’s life. It was wrong to lie. It was his duty as a decent man, an honorable man, to tell Anatole the truth.

He made the plan to do so in the morning but when morning came, he drank himself too stupid to stand. Tomorrow, he told himself, only for tomorrow to have the same result, and the day after that and after that passed by in nothing but a stupor.

He was not running away.

He was biding his time, planning and rehearsing what he would say. He was calculating the possibilities of an extremely predictable child. He was not running away.

He made the trudge, hungover, through fresh patches of snow to the manor and knocked on the door. Hélène answered, looking at him with barely concealed distaste.

He asked about the wait staff when she failed to greet him, how they used to swarm the place taking coats and dusting table tops. The front room was dusty, the curtains still drawn despite the morning sun but Hélène paid it no mind as she shucked his coat into a closet.

She shrugged and said it was unimportant that she shortened the staff after the ‘accident’ and then asked, “What is it you want? Anatole wants no visitors today.”

Anatole didn’t need people to see him like this went unsaid. _She_ didn’t need people to see him like this. As far as Moscow knew, Anatole was in Petersburg and she wished Pierre would be as clueless as the rest.

But he wasn’t and he wouldn’t, "I wish to speak with him, regardless.”

“I wish that you’d take a walk onto a thawing lake, dear husband,” was her response. “Dolokhov told me what you talked about. Do not do it.”

“He deserves the truth.”

“Anatole deserves nothing,” She snapped. “He is – he is a _child_. He brought it onto himself and you took it too far, you both hold fault and I wish him not to have to carry that burden even if it means easing your own.”

“He has never carried anything,” Pierre snapped back. “Every scandal that he has brought to our door since arriving in Moscow, since _before_ arriving in Moscow? It rolls off his back like a duck as you run ragged correcting it. You pay my money, you use blackmail and seduction, you make excuses! You _fix_ things for him but you cannot fix this.”

“Because you broke him!” She shouted back. “You – you are a monster and you are masquerading as his friend.”

“Then I will stop, I will come clean,” He conceded, ripping his shoulder from her grasp as he moved towards the stairs.

She followed, “No, you will not! Anatole is not having visitors, I told you-“

He was neither swayed by her following steps or by her words. He bounded up the stairs and down the halls, his wife hot on his heels, and pushing the door open with more force than needed but all that righteous anger dissipated at the sight in front of him, “What – what is going on?”

Anatole did not dignify him with even a glance of acknowledgement and neither did Dolokhov, their eyes firmly set on each other. They were at a standoff, a stalemate, with a blade held between them.

Anatole’s hand was wrapped tight around Dolokhov’s wrist, the blade held firmly in the other’s hand. His teeth gritted together, his jaw hutting out into what was essentially a very cute pout and his eyes were gleaming with the frustrated tears of a stubborn child, a stubborn Kuragin.

The only movement between them was the sluggish drip of blood from a cut on Anatole’s jaw, pooling in a soap puddle along his collarbone. Hélène shoved passed him and then sighed, “What did you do?”

“I? It is the stubborn fool,” Dolokhov swore and Anatole’s eyes grew harder. He blinked hard, looking away only to shoot Hélène a harsh look.

Pierre could not help but feel as if his lungs loss their capacity for oxygen by the state of the man. Bare-chested and bandage-free, he could see the full extent of what the ‘accident’ had done to his brother-in-law.

Anatole had always been a slender man, lean and strong, but now with the loss of muscle from being bedridden and ribs so easy to count, he looked like a deprived teenager oppose to the son of a prince. The matters were made worse by the water damp hair, messy and uneven, jagged where the doctor had cut it down and stitches stark against the strains of blond. He had half a beard.

Hélène crossed her arms, giving both men an unimpressed look, content to wait them out but Pierre could not, “You are bleeding.”

“He did it himself,” Dolokhov ignored the look that was sent his way. “Damn fool, tried to _shave_ after his bath.”

“And where were you when he tried this?”

“Retrieving bandages, Countess.”

“I am not – not a child,” Anatole hissed, words slow and menacing. He was glaring hard before a hand shot out and hit Dolokhov between the ribs, grabbing the blade in his surprise. “I can – I _can_ do this.”

“Anatole,” Hélène sighed, watching with a curious look of dread on her face as the blade shook in his hand. She hissed slightly when he held it to his face, “Anatole, stop.”

“Hélène.”

“Stop, let me help-“

“No,” He snapped.

“Let Pierre help, then,” She said gesturing to her husband’s bearded face. “Let him practice, he needs it.”

Anatole considered this for a moment and then held the blade out, Pierre hesitated before stepping farther into the room. Dolokhov moved, letting Pierre take his place in the chair across from Anatole. He took the blade.

Dolokhov stood guard like a dog and Hélène moved around the room, busying herself while Pierre took Anatole’s jaw into his hand, “Do not cut him.”

“Thank you, Fyodor, for that helpful advice,” Pierre muttered, dragging the blade across the surface of Anatole’s cheek. He preferred a beard, it did not mean that he didn’t know how to shave.

He ignored the slight blush working up Anatole’s neck, ignored the feeling of how humiliating this felt, and made quick work of the rest of the hair. When he stepped away, Dolokhov came in quickly to swipe the blood from his neck and the remaining water before Anatole could push him away, “Fedya!”

“Awe, there is a prince under there after all,” He replied, ignoring the hands and gentle rubbing the towel over his hair. “A half-dressed prince, it seems. What is new?”

Anatole shoved him, a laugh bursting from his mouth in a huff. For a moment, they could believe that everything was as it was before. Pierre had overheard dozens of conversations between the two just like this one but the thought fell apart when Hélène handed her brother a shirt and he struggled with the buttons.

A frustrated growl escaped him when he shoved Hélène’s helpful hands away, fiddling with the buttons before sighing loudly, “I can put on a shirt, dear sister.”

“I know, brother, but I would like for it to be before you have to put on another.”

“Ha,” He rolled his eyes, the right still unfocused and dilated. “Hi-lar-i-ous.”

He gave up and let Hélène make quick work of the rest of them. He was in a good mood, they all seemed to be. And then Pierre ruined it.

Anatole had turned to him, smiling and spreading his arms out. He asked with a wiggle of his eyebrows, “How do I look, old man?”

Pierre was overcome with such relief that maybe he did not completely break the kid, he leaned over to fix Anatole’s twisted collar and then ruffled his thick hair. His hand brushed too close to the sensitive skin around the stitches on accident, causing Anatole to flinch and to bring his hand up the skin. They froze and then Anatole froze, his fingers pressed against where his hair should have been.

“Wh- _what!_ ” He hissed, standing up so quickly and jousting the table so the soapy water sloshed over the edge of its bowl. He fumbled, pushing Dolokhov’s hands away from him, scouring the top of the dresser, “Where is-“

He broke off into a string of unintelligible jabbering and then growled, turned towards them and pointing accusingly at the dresser. His voice was clear when he spoke next, “Mirror.”

“I had them removed,” Hélène answered honestly and it was all Anatole desired to hear before he took his clumsy feet and ran. “Anatole-“

He ignored her pretty words, her excuses and explanations. He had a problem with balance, with coordination, and the panicked anger made it worse when he bypassed Dolokhov’s attempt to stop him by veering directly into a chair.  They both went to the floor but it did not deter him as he stumbled back to his feet and darted from the room.

They followed.

“Open the door, Anatole.” No response was forthcoming, only the sound of something heavy being moved and shoved against it. Hélène knocked again and sighed, “Brother, let me in. Just me.”

She waited for a moment and then pounded harder on the door, “Do not be a child, Anatole. It is not important and you are not that vain.”

“Yes, I am!”

She rolled her eyes, “I do not care what you look like.”

“You – you cared enough to not tell me,” He accused. “Liar, all of you. Go ‘way.”

When Hélène’s shoulders dropped and she rested her forehead against the doorframe, they knew it was a losing fight. Kuragins were stubborn, Anatole even more so. They would have to wait it out was a cold and settling realization, and one that pissed Dolokhov right off.

Pierre did not have time to brace himself before hands grabbed his collar and his back hit the wall hard, painted portraits of his ancestors rattled on the wall, “You-“

“Not here, Dolokhov.”

His eyes flickered to Hélène and then Pierre was hauled away from the wall and pushed down the hall, stumbling against the strong hold on his shirt. He stumbled through the door when Dolokhov threw him onto the floor of the first unlocked room he found, “Fedya.”

“What is this?” Dolokhov demanded. “One final hit? Tending to the cracks before you shatter him completely or do you just break everything you touch, old man?”

“What?”

“Wanted to get one more dig in before you tell him that you hurt him?” He sneered, hauling Pierre back to his feet. “Or does it make you feel better about your sorry life to see everybody as miserable as you?”

“That’s not-“

“Is it not?” Dolokhov sneered, brandishing his gun and pressing the barrel against his cheek. Pierre froze, his eyes flickering to the doorway to where Hélène stood watching. Dolokhov noticed too, “Do not tell me to stop, Hélène.”

“I will not,” She said, her voice void but her eyes alive with only curiosity as if the actions before her were that of a play. She seemed almost removed from the situation or perhaps hyperaware of it. She’d always like to see how these kinds of things played out.

“The – the gun, it is too loud.” The words were meek and clumsy, Pierre had not known they were his until they tripped from his tongue. “It – Anatole, will hear.”

Dolokhov considered the words and holstered the gun but before Pierre could even allow himself to entertain the possibility of getting out of this room unharmed, a blade was pressed against his throat. He smirked, something so Anatole that Dolokhov had to have picked it up at some point, “This is better, yes? I will enjoy this.”

“You are an assassin.”

Rather a simple observation or a slight against his character, Pierre was not sure what he meant by the words but Dolokhov’s eyes burnt with a fierce indignity. The look bled into hate, the blade pressing harder against his jugular, and Pierre was reminded of fire.

The kind of fire that burnt hot and angry within the heart and through veins to starve off the cold chill of hopelessness because a man that put his reputation on the line for the impulsive whims of a childish prince was a man in love so deeply that nothing else mattered. And now, that prince was changed – _broken, and small, with hands that could not pluck the strings of hearts or violins -_  and he was never going to be the same man again. Dolokhov had lost what he held dear and Pierre had been the one to crush it into dust and ashes.

He deserved this, they all knew that he did, “I will not fight you, Fyodor.”

“You are a wretched old man,” Dolokhov snapped, there was no anger there just frustration, a righteous confusion. The flame flickered from his eyes and winter took over. He dropped Pierre without a fight, dropping the knife to the floor, “You are a wretched _fool_. Do you not want to live?”

“I don’t want to hurt anybody else.”

“You will not hurt me,” He sneered, running his fingers through his already messy hair. “You’d lose.”

“His blood will not satisfy you,” Hélène spoke from her spot in the doorway, a conclusion that Dolokhov had already come to. “It will not mend his guilt or your heart, Fedya.”

“He deserves it, deserves to feel – feel _pain_.”

“I know,” She said simply and then sighed, her eyes meeting Pierre’s with something like understanding and something like pity. “Anatole would never understand, Fedya, he would not know how to forgive you.”

“I know,” he snapped and then breathed out, eying Pierre with that same understanding, the ways soldiers eyed their wounded brothers. “I will not alleviate his guilt.”

“Nor your own,” She stated. “Help me prepare lunch, Fedya.”

He snorted and just like that, the air in the room shifted. It was the dance of the Kuragins, high intensity and passionate until it was not to their liking and then they moved on. “You do not cook, Countess.”

“I like to watch,” She replied, holding out her hand. “Come.”

Pierre said nothing, felt everything and nothing all at once as he watched his wife leave hand and hand with her lover. He was too tired to feel angry.

 

 

Pierre paced.

Haunting the halls like a ghost, Pierre paced and Anatole stayed hidden behind a locked door. He paced as Hélène pounded steadfast onto the door, threatening terror and hell fire in spades as she cursed his stubbornness and childish ways. He paced as her resolve weakened, turning to logic – _you need to eat, dear brother -_  to pleading, as near to begging as she’d allow herself – _Anatole, I wish to see you._

_Anatole, please._

_Anatole, open the door._

Pierre paced.

He paced with his head down and eyes on the ground as Dolokhov stood outside the door describing different foods in the details of a poet, as he poked fun – _A young prince locked inside of a room, I think I’ve heard this one before. Am I the dashing hero?_ – and recounted their escapades – _I don’t tell the story right, you must do it for me, Anatole._

Pierre paced, he said nothing.

Anatole refused to see anybody the next morning, voice a distant rumble of ‘hmm’ and ‘uh-huh’ and ‘very busy, Fedya, later.’ Lunch was met with much the same and dinner was a grand hall too grand for three people and their discussion of breaking down doors.

Then there was a rush of cold air.

With a different hair style and his usual jaunty step, Anatole joined them.

He’d always loved an entrance.

Thick blond hair was cut and styled, combed forward and to the side to cover where the hair had been cut away and it flopped over his forehead, into his eye. It almost hid the unfocused dilation of the pupil, making him appear so much younger, and brighter, and happy.

You could hardly tell, Dolokhov told him after a gawking moment. He told him that the cut looked great, Anatole smiled and flippantly added that he was trying something new, “Cannot let the girls get bored, eh?”

“As if they’d ever tire of you.”

“Pierre,” He greeted, smiling that impossibly charming smile. “You are back for good, yes? Bolkonsky has re-recovered?”

His brow furrowed at the stumble at the end of his sentence but his smile remained the same. Pierre could not fight himself from returning one of his own, nodding slowly, “Audrey is well.”

“All is well,” Anatole replied, leaning across the time with a sly grin. “Lend me fifty rubles.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had every intention to have this chapter up yesterday but I kinda...put off writing a twenty-paged proposal to solve my university's armed robbery problem until the day that it was due. Why my English professor thinks that I am qualified to solve that particular problem, I do not know. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

“I was not thrown from my horse.”

Pierre looked up from his papers, into eyes half-closed with drink and the pull of sleep but brows furrowed together in thought or pain. There was little relief for the migraines that plagued Anatole after the ‘accident’ but the vodka helped with the mild headaches before it progressed any farther.

Hélène’s fingers stopped the soothing motion of running through Anatole’s hair, “What was that?”

“’s not right, I have – haven’t ridden a horse in years.”

Anatole nudged at her laxed hands until she started up again before continuing, “I don’t like horses.”

“I know, dear brother.”

“I stopped riding them once – once father allowed me,” He spoke, eyes slipping closed but his voice was _sure_ , confident that he was right. “I know that. I could not have been thrown from a horse.”

“Are you misremembering, brother?” Hélène asked vaguely. “You were kicked?”

“In the head?” He asked thoughtfully before dismissing it. “Hélène, I hate the barn. I never went there.”

“The troika.”

“Balaga’s horses are very trained,” He sighed when he ran her fingernails across his scalp. “That’s not right.”

The silence dragged with only the sound of an occasional sigh before he declared with finality, “I was mugged, I remember. There was a bottle.”

That had happened too, Pierre thought, in Poland.

It was before Pierre’s time with the Kuragins but not so much so that the scar at his hairline had faded into the thin white line that it was now. Dolokhov had been the one to come to his aid, if he remembered correctly.

“If that’s what you remember,” Hélène echoed. “Have you eaten today, Anatole?”

“Hmm,” He hummed. “Let me sleep.”

That, of course, was a resounding _no_ but Hélène did not push it when the headaches and migraines made it difficult to keep anything down. At least, he managed the vodka to take the edge off and was still doing a pretty good job holding a conversation.

Anatole’s sleep came not-at-all when the door was cracked open and Dolokhov’s head appeared in the light from the hallway. He asked, “Head pain?”

“The worse, Fedya, I swear,” Anatole whined, turning his face into Hélène’s side to avoid the silver of light from the hallway. When the door shut behind him and they were once again engulfed in the low light of a single lantern, he peaked a look at his friend, “Are you going to the club?”

“The opera,” He replied, smoothing down the buttons on his jacket before holding out his hand, “Countess, will you be joining me this evening?”

“Of course, Dolokhov,” She said, adjusting Anatole so he was leaning against a pillow instead of her before sliding off the bed.

Anatole seemed to just be noticing her dress for the first time and frowned, “I was not invited.”

“You don’t like the theater,” Dolokhov accused. “You always show up late and make too much racket.”

He huffed and crossed his arms, looking more and more like a child, “I want to go.”

“No, Anatole,” Hélène told him, “You are sick.”

“I feel better now, let me-“

“No,” She repeated, the commanding tone again though it only worked to annoy Anatole. “You rest. Pierre will keep you company.”

Both Hélène and Dolokhov’s eyes flickered over Anatole’s head to Pierre, daring him to try something while they made their appearances and tried to salvage what was left of the Kuragin name. He did not waiver in his stare back and none of them subtle enough to not be noticed by Anatole, “I do not need a keeper, Hélène, I am grown.”

She sighed, “Then, dear brother, act like it and take care of yourself. You are ailing and you need rest. Stay home and rest, Anatole.”

“And Pierre?”

“He is to make sure that you do so,” She told him, the corner of her lips turning up. “Even if he has to sit on you.”

 

His senses were dulled with sleep.

An odd occurrence, he thought, considering that he had no intention of taking a nap and yet…his eyes were bleary, his glasses crooked, and he could taste sleep on his tongue.

Pierre rubbed at his neck and his aching shoulders from being slumped over a chair for who-knows-how-long before his mind snapped into focus. Once he realized that the rug under his feet and the fur across his shoulders were not the ones from his study, he realized how eerily quiet the room was. How alone he was because Anatole was not here.

He stood quickly and rushed to the door.

Anatole was not in his study, he was not in Pierre’s either, nor the kitchen or the pantry. He was – he had wanted to leave and Pierre was supposed to ensure that that didn’t happen. He-

“Sir?” A servant startled him, standing down the hall from him. Before Pierre could ask if he’d seen Anatole, he spoke again, “Countess Rostova is in the drawing room.”

“What?”

 

The air felt lighter when he saw Natasha out, he felt light, but then the weight of the world slammed back onto his shoulders when he turned back towards the door, “Hélène.”

“Pierre.”

Hélène had always been beautiful but in the moonlight and her evening wear and the way the light reflected off her pearls, she was breathtaking. Breathtaking and angry. Very, very angry.

“Hélène.”

“The Rostova girl was _in there_ ,” She hissed, stalking towards him and then shoving him. “Stupid, stupid husband! What if Anatole saw her? What if she saw _him_? Do you want this to start all over again? Stupid.”

“Anatole.”

There was something in his voice because she stopped ranting about his carelessness and stared at him, eyes critical. “Where is my brother?”

“He-“

“Pierre, where is Anatole?” She did not wait for an answer, turning on her heels and rushing into the house. She was already coming back down the stairs when he shut the front door, she hit him, “Where is he, Pierre?”

“I – I don’t know.”

“ _You don’t know!_ ” She screeched. “Why the hell not?”

“I – I fell asleep,” He tried to explain, braced himself for the next hit. She had not disappointed. “He was gone when I woke, I was looking for him when Countess Rostova was here.”

“And you thought she was more important than my injured brother? Of course, you did.” She rolled her eyes, taking off down the hall. “Did he leave the house?”

“I don’t know.”

He hadn’t, it turned out.

Hélène searched every nook and cranny with Pierre right behind her so she had an audience as she described in detail all the ways she was going to kill him if she did not find Anatole. Perhaps saving Pierre the loss of his testicles, they found her brother in a compromising state of undress in an unused room on the second floor with one of the servant girls, “Out! Out now, take – get out of my sight before your job is not the only thing you lose.”

“Wha – Hélène!” Anatole whined as the girl gathered her things and rushed from the room, red with embarrassment and shame. “She is _not_ firing you, Natalie! Wait, I-“

“What?” Pierre froze to his place in the doorway and even Hélène looked as if such a simple name had struck her. “What was that, brother?”

“Her name, Natalie,” He snapped, making to stand but with his clothes half on, he only managed to stumbled back onto the longue chair they’d made use of. He tugged his pants back up instead, indignant in every movement before asking snidely, “How was the theater?”

“Not nearly as entertaining as your evening, it appears,” She replied, taking in his disheveled hair and the sheen of sweat on his bare chest. “You are meant to be resting.”

“I was partaking in some…stress relief,” Anatole replied, pulling his shirt back on but not bothering with the buttons. “Do you know how long it took to convince her to come here with me and it was all for not. Thank you, Hélène.”

He rolled his eyes and she copied the move before asking in an equally juvenile tone, “Long? You’re losing your touch, brother.”

“I am not!”

Anatole tried to stand again, managing to get to his feet using the arm of the chair to steady himself. He blinked a few times before shaking his head of the obvious dizziness that overcame him but when he leaned down to pick up his discarded vest, his knee buckled beneath him, “Anatole?”

“Don’t,” He breathed through his teeth, eyes closed and face tight. Hélène’s hands hovered just over his shoulder. “I am – am cape-able of m-making it back to m’ room.”

He managed to right himself again, that sheen of sweat becoming more and more a collection of perspiration on his forehead. He looked pale.

“Anatole, I’m worried,” She told him, watching like a hawk as a shaky hand came up so he could wipe his forehead with his sleeve. It wasn’t just his hands, all of him was shaking. “Anatole?”

He opened his mouth, an assurance on the tip of his tongue but all that came out was a jumble of sounds and a look of confusion that rolled into the back of his head.

Hélène darted forward as Anatole went slack but it was Pierre that caught most of his weight. There was nothing they could do when he started to convulse on the floor.


	5. Chapter 5

It was a hollow look that returned to them.

Three nights, another seizure, and Dolokhov’s belt shoved between sharp teeth. Three nights, no sleep, and a doctor that told them that miracles were just reprieves from the inevitable. Three nights, a weak grip on big, big hands, and eyes blinked open.

Empty pales eyes that reflected worry-stricken faces but retained nothing, acknowledged nothing. Unresponsive blank eyes in an exhausted sunken face, it was nightmarish in its horrification. A horrible terrifying thing in the complacency in which Anatole’s pale slender hands, and his empty eyes, and a body so cold and shaking became like furniture that they moved and cleaned. It was frightening.

It was pindrop silence and stocking feet pacing to and fro, to and fro, to and fro in maddening repetition, and the horrifying and soundless sobs of a lost and terrified sister. It was waiting, and whispery snippets of long ago tales from a childhood lonelier than either of them knew. It was waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for something to happen, for anything. The descent into ruin.

“Wha’ppen.”

A slurred and pitiful thing, and no response before impassive eyes slide back into restless sleep. For a collective second, everybody breathed. For a second, everything was peaceful, and for a second, Hélène was just a whisper instead of a sob.

Dolokhov paced and Pierre, he waited.

“Seizure?” Anatole repeated the word in a slow mechanical whisper. It was midday, he’d slept for nearly fourteen hours uninterrupted and looked as if he had not slept a wink. “I don’t understand.”

“I have seen them before,” Dolokhov spoke, a voice a soft and comforting hum like the fear of shattering a child’s dream. “In the med camps during the war, certain kinds of injuries. It sounds-“

“I was in _Poland_ ,” Anatole stressed the words into a clear and crisped panic. It took effort, almost too much of it. “I never-r even – there was no batt-le front that I saw, Fedya. The assumption -it is wrong. Hélène-“

“Your head, Anatole,” She said softly, reaching forward to run a comforting hand through his hair but he shielded away. “Doctor-“

“A quack! And wrong! Tell – tell her that she is wrong, Pierre.”

Pierre said nothing. He could not bring himself to meet Anatole’s tired eyes. He could not see passed his own guilt to be able to provide comforting words, could not shake himself of the fear that seized him in that moment or rid his mind of Hélène’s cries. He had nothing to offer but his guilt so he gave nothing.

“P-Pierre, old man,” Anatole insisted, words a jumbled mess, jabbing his finger into Pierre’s elbow until he was forced to acknowledge him. “You are wise, tell them that they are wrong. Tell – tell them. Y-your studies-“

“This – because I slipped on the ice?” He continued indignant, rising panic in every slurred word. “This is – is re- _ri_ diculous, I will not hear any more of this! Pierre tell – tell them they are wrong.”

Like the horse and the mugging, that had happened, too. They were Russian, everybody fell on the ice.

“They are not wrong, Anatole,” He finally spoke, standing from his chair. “I – I am afraid that I will be absent in the coming days. I have to go.”

He could not stay here, not when Anatole was frightened and scared, and looked so damn young. He could not stay here after all the damage he’d done. He needed to rid them of the monster beneath his skin. He just – he needed to leave.

 

He was composing a letter in the front room, a quick notice to Natasha that he could be found at the Inn if she wished to speak, when a shadow fell over him. He sighed, “If you wish to kill me, you will have to follow through this time.”

“I am not going to kill you,” Fedya spoke, his arms crossed. “You are not leaving.”

“What?”

“I delivered that letter because you are Anatole’s friend,” He spoke again, his voice like the command of a soldier as oppose to the gentle voice he’d used with Anatole only moments ago, “He thinks highly of you for some reason, trusts you, and he was rather insistent to see you despite his state. He is too proud, vain, and yet, he wanted you here. You are not leaving.”

“I am the reason we are having this conversation,” He replied. “I am the reason he was convulsing on the floor.”

“We have all wanted to beat sense into his thick skull,” He shrugged, a stiff movement that showed that he did not exactly agree with his own words. “I do not like you, I have wanted to kill you.”

“I am aware.”

“Anatole needs you here,” He continued. “You do not care about him the way Hélène does, the way I – I do. He needs that or he will surely go mad in this big house.”

“I cannot stay here.”

“Then go if you must,” He conceded. “And tomorrow, you come back.”

 

Pierre arrive to the manor to silence for almost a week and then two morning in a row to the sound of a violin screeching, spent afternoons catching glances of pacing, snippets of muttering about strings and notes, and a bow shaking in elegant long fingers. Like a damn ghost, he was not sure if he was the haunting or the haunted.

On the third day, there was silence and closed doors.

On the fourth, the violin broke against the floor as it was thrown from the top of the stairs, “Pointless, pointless, stupid – it is all so _damn_ stupid.”

He watched almost numbed with shock and guilt as Hélène gathered the pieces and asked Dolokhov if it could be salvaged. It could, Pierre offered to pay.

Pierre was under no delusion that Hélène could love him, that she ever did or ever would. There had been a time when that realization had hurt but they had learned to work around each other’s eccentrics, to live with each other’s company, to talk in anything other than scathing comments. All that was built over the weeks crumbled when Anatole did.

Her eyes were guarded and closed, filled with only hate when looking upon him. She hated him again and he did not blame her. He drank, and read, and he drank more until the look did not burn. He apologized, she did not listen.

Anatole energy returned and he talked increasingly of leaving, of the club and his many lovers. There was a growing line of tension between him and Hélène and it was going to snap soon than later.

“You are not going anywhere!” She snapped at one point, between the idle dinner conversation, talks of Dolokhov and drinks and ‘ _Will you come, Old Man?’_ until Hélène’s glass shattered with the impact in which she sat it down. “Anywhere, Anatole, you will not go anywhere! Have I made myself clear?”

The surprise in his eyes gave way to annoyance, “You are not my keeper, Hélène.”

“Am I?” She asked sarcastically. “Is it not I that pulls you from the fires you jump so gaily into? Is it not I that pays your tabs and your bail, that keeps you safe. That takes care of you?”

“No one is asking you to do that,” He shot back. “If I am so much of an annoyance, dear sister, I will find my lodgings elsewhere.”

“No, you will not.”

“I-“ He stood, shoving his plate away with a force that sent it off the table. A smirk settled onto his lips, one Pierre had seen in his wife many times before, “I will see you in the morning, eh? Pierre, good man, send word to Dolokhov, I wish to go on an adventure. Lend me fifty rubles?”

“Anatole,” Hélène called when he made it to the doorway. There was a challenge in his eyes when he met hers and then something changed because her voice was soft when she spoke, “Let me get you another plate, finish eating before you go.”

He considered and then conceded, sat back down while she went about preparing him a plate and refilled his glass. Pierre did not know why it surprised him when the blond was slumped over the table before dinner’s end, “Did you drug him?”

“Of course, I did, he was being an idiot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I blame the super depressing start of this chapter on the fact that it was added in during editing and I have been writing a wasn't-supposed-to-be-depressing-but-here-we-are fic and the mood is seeping into my other work.
> 
> Also, I realize that I've missed the opportunity to call back to Find Anatole when Pierre was looking for Anatole in the last chapter.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning, this chapter is mostly fluff.

 “Chin up.”

“If my chin was any higher then-“ Dolokhov spoke, a small protested annoyance as slender fingers pressed against his jaw and raised his chin higher to meet the amusement in blue irises. The silence held between them snapped as the book from atop his head slid down his back to the floor with a thud.

Anatole chuckled, “Then the book would not have fallen.”

“I fear that you are jesting me for your own amusement,” Dolokhov huffed, shooing the hand away so he could pick the book up off the floor. He placed it back on top of his head, holding it there. “I look ridiculous.”

“Posture is of importance on the dance floor, mon cher,” Anatole hummed, circling him in a lazy listless fashion as he adjusted Dolokhov’s stance, his shoulders, his spine, tilting his chin until it was to his liking. He paused and then commanded, “Walk.”

Dolokhov took a hesitant step, and then another, and then he caught the book as it tumbled forward from his head. Anatole scoffed, “You walk like a soldier, mon cher, not a dancer. It is most embarrassing.”

“I apologize that I do not ‘flounce’ like you, _Prince_ Anatole,” He grumbled but attempted to copy Anatole’s heel-toe walk. They both knew he’d never be so light on his feet. “We did not all spend our childhoods prancing down castle halls and across ballroom floors.”

“Pity, that is most unfortunate,” He deadpanned, lifting Dolokhov’s arms into frame around his body and taking his hand in his own. “I do not prance, I glide, and it was you that asked for my help, Fedya. I am teaching you to dance, eh? Glide with me.”

“I regret that I asked,” He muttered halfheartedly, allowing Anatole to glide him around the room almost awkwardly as the two fought for the lead.

In truth, Dolokhov could hold his own on the ballroom floor but Anatole had been antsy as of late. He was the bird to Hélène’s cage and the freedom laid out of reach so he was testy, and immature, and Hélène was the enemy. Dolokhov had found himself in the middle of a Kuragin fight once before and had more desire to see the battlefield than to see that again.

Dancing was a welcoming distraction for the prince and well, Dolokhov thought it was nice, too.

“Mon cher?” Anatole asked in a whispery hum that echoed hauntingly in his eardrum, so close that he could feel the ghost of warm breath across his neck. “Will you compose me a letter?”

“I – what?”

“Write,” He began, breaking frame in the center of the room. He wrote the his sloppy scrawl into the air as he continued, “Dear my sweet sister, Hélène, I do not wish to see you a single day until you admit the ways you wronged me.”

“That is rich coming from a man that cannot even admit to lightening his hair with lemon juice,” Hélène spoke from the doorway, her arms crossed. “It is no fault of my own that you are ill and seek sleep at the dinner table. You should not be at the club anyways.”

“But I _want to go –_ “ Anatole stomped his foot in frustration, glaring before turning back to Dolokhov, ‘I am a prisoner with no crimes, it is unjust!”

 “Anatole,” He sighed because that statement was more than a little questionable. He was Dolokhov the assassin. Dolokhov the peacekeeper, the babysitter. “Hélène is only looking after you.”

Anatole snorted and pouted, Dolokhov continued, “It was a scary occurrence, the seizures, and you would not want one to occur at the club, in front of everybody. Would you?”

“I…” He trailed off, his brow furrowing in through and then he pushed it all away with a wave of his hand. “Oh.”

“You see now, yes, dear brother?” She asked, voice deceptively soft and her hands a gentle curl around narrow wrists as she pulled her brother into her embrace. It was a battle won when he did not pull back though no apology would be brought forth by either of them.

Dolokhov felt a rush of guilt and shame as Anatole smiled at her, light and forgiving more than he knew, before asking with an air of brotherly mischief, “Dolokhov is a dreadful partner, may I have this dance?”

 

 

After the accident with the staff minimized and the parties long over, the house often fell into heavy silence when Anatole was suffering. It felt empty and abandoned when Pierre walked through the door, like a ghost house or child’s nightmare but today, it was merry. There was laughter.

The high giggle that could only be Anatole was accompanied by the sound of footsteps bounding down the stairs. Pierre heard him before he saw him and had to jump back to not get whacked by wayward limbs as he sped pass. The words thrown over his shoulders were lighthearted, slightly jumbled but neither paid it any mind.

Pierre’s brow twisted into a cross of amusement and confusion as Dolokhov followed quickly down the stairs, muttering about the ‘damn slippery bastard.’ Pierre’s back hit the coat rack to avoid being barreled into and curiosity flooded him at the puddles left in the assassins’ wake.  

He cleared his throat when Anatole’s loose footing on the arm of the couch he was climbing over slipped and the only thing keeping him from a heap on the floor was Dolokhov’s tug on the waistband of his trousers. They both crashed down onto the couch, a ball of snow between them before it was scooped up and shoved in Anatole’s face.

“You were outside?” He was outraged. ‘What were you thinking? What were _you_ thinking, Dolokhov? Taking him outside!”

There was a sigh and Anatole went slack against Dolokhov, “Pierre-“

“No,” He snapped, calming himself against Anatole’s pout and Dolokhov’s glare and then felt angry again. “Hélène has explained-“

“Hélène explains nothing, she _tells_ ,” Anatole protested, rolling his eyes like a child. A stupid, stupid child that does not think of the consequences. “I would not go into town if that is what you are worried about, just the yard.”

“If anybody saw-“ He trailed off because Anatole didn’t know. He doesn’t remember and Pierre was a coward. He thought it was a blitz attack brought on by the husband of a jealous ex-lover, he thought it was in the escape of a bear, an injury sustained as an officer of war, a hundred other could-be possibilities. He did not know.  

Anatole’s face fell and he rubbed subconsciously at his hair, “I know that-“

“Not because-“

“You look great, Anatole,” Dolokhov told him, ruffling his fingers through the fringe to mess it up. “It is a nice cut, very handsome.”

“Pierre, old man,” Anatole spoke, voice soft. Slow so the slur stayed hidden beneath indignant childish protest as he shoved Dolokhov’s hand away. “Fedya brought the snow inside.”

“Why?”

“I miss the snow.”

“This is Russia, there will always be snow.”

“You’re right, Pierre,” Anatole agreed, something unsure and unfamiliar passed over his face but only for a moment. “You are a good friend.”

“A good friend,” Dolokhov echoed, eyes cold and unwavering.

The feeling of sinking into acid fell into Pierre’s stomach, he went down to his study.

 

He emerged from his study after the sun had set and the stench of copper and blood that soiled the room since, well since _then_ , became too much for him to handle while the bottles beneath his desk were empty. He emerged to the sound of chattering in the front room, to laughing, and to dancing.

When he peaked inside, Anatole’s hands were pressed against Dolokhov’s waist and hand, counting in a low hum as they twirled around the room. He could not help the surprise smile that crept onto his face as they glided across the floor.

Anatole, for all his annoyance, was an exceptionally beautiful man. Slender in the way he remembered Aline Kuragina being, charming and carefree, and in this moment as graceful as he used to be. That is, until they backed into a table and nearly took the lantern off it.

Hélène laughed, sitting her glass down to clap her hands from where she sat watching on the couch, “Bravo!”

 Dolokhov managed to steady the two of them, Anatole dipped in his strong arms. Eyes drawn to each other and lips parted, it did not surprise Pierre as he thought it should have when Dolokhov closed the gap with a soft kiss before pulling the man to a stand.

Anatole shoved him back so to get a better standing, only to be pulled forward into Dolokhov’s arms by a hand on his wrist. There was a hazy drunk grin on his lips as he stared down at the shorter man with hooded eyes, “Mon cher, I’m afraid I taught you the woman’s part.”

Dolokhov threw his head back in a guffawing laugh, pulling Anatole down into a rough kiss that was greedily returned. The only thing pulling them apart was the wolf-like whistle from Hélène.

Pierre ducked out of the room before he could see the blush across Anatole’s cheeks. It was not until he ran into the trio pulling a drunk and stumbling Anatole back to his room that a thought occurred to him so sudden and violent that it felt as if he’d been struck.

When Hélène left Dolokhov to tend to Anatole’s nightwear and ran into Pierre outside the door, he vocalized that thought, “You’re not sleeping with him, with Dolokhov.”

“With Dolokhov? No.” She snorted, “No, dear husband, you shot an innocent man in the shoulder for no honorable reason.”

And then she floated down the hall, a hum on her lips and a glide in her step, drunk and happy. He allowed himself to smiled at that, downcast his eyes as what he saw through the crack in the door and decided that he would stay for the night.

 

Morning came and went with late breakfast and a lot of whining as Anatole was pulled out of his bed despite his insistence of a headache, “It is a hangover, you are hungover. You cannot hold your liquor.”

“Yes, I can.”

“It’s quite embarrassing, brother, and so endearing,” Hélène teased. “My darling Anatole, a lightweight. Who would have thought?”

He grumbled with his head pillowed by his arms at the dining room table and then groaned when something was sat down loudly next to his head. When he looked up with bleary eyes, he glared, “Fedya.”

“Yes?”

“Why is there a violin case next to me?” He asked, squinting up at the other man before his eyes returned to the decorative case with a glare, “My violin was in pieces last I saw it and my hands-“

“You need practice,” He told him. “And patience. Do you expect me to impress women with the dance moves you taught me to subpar _noise_? No. There is no sound as worthy as you with a bow.”

“Charming,” He said flatly and then put his head back down. “No.”

“Anatole.”

“I’m not picking up that instrument,” He declared. “You cannot make me.”

Anatole picked up the violin.

First to observe the wood and the new strings because it was, after all, the very best that Pierre’s money could buy. He held it experimentally under his chin, moved his arm as if he was holding the bow and then he put it back down, “No. No, I can’t.”

Anatole played.

Grumbling about stupid, stupid men with stupid green uniforms, his faulty hands, and how the violin, though beautiful, was a dumb instrument anyways. Grumbling about Fedya’s puppy eyes, Fedya’s insistence, and the whereabouts of Fedya’s guitar because he surely needed the practice but Anatole did play that day.

It was slow and deliberate, nothing compared to what the man had played for the guest of his father nor what he composed in the past but nonetheless, it was beautiful. “See, what did I tell you?”

“No one likes a know-it-all, Fedya.”

“Hmm, who is going to tell Pierre?”

Anatole sat the violin down carefully on his desk, clasped Dolokhov in an embrace so tender and even pressed a kiss to the other man’s forehead before pulling away. He cleared his throat, a blush on his cheeks for being so affectionate, but offered to find them another bottle of vodka, “Pierre, it appears, polished ours off during my last performance.”

“I did not.”

“Aye, old man,” Anatole conceded with a smile, emptying the very last drops into his glass before declaring that he would get another bottle. Only, Anatole never returned.

He didn’t but a servant did, “Sir, Countess Rostova-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun, dun, dun. Natasha is actually in the next chapter. Woo! 
> 
> A little BTW, my favorite part of this whole fic thus far is Helene's implication that yes, she is cheating on Pierre just not with Dolokhov. As always, thank you to everybody that is leaving kudos and comments, and bookmarking, and really just reading this.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The decent into ruin that Pierre was worried about, that starts now.

Natasha was frightened.

She felt the prickle of panic up her spine, felt her heart in her chest and the hammering so painful against her ribs. She felt the hysterical ends of denial snap as she blinked once, twice.

Her breath stammered and her eyes went wide in surprise, in shock, when the shadow casted across the figure in the doorway cleared. Her mouth hung open before she gathered her wits about herself and slammed it shut, “Oh.”

Even after she composed herself, her voice was still a haunted breathless, “Anatole.”

The figure in the doorway raised an eyebrow at her, shoulder resting against the frame with his arms across his chest and his legs crossed in a stance at the ankles almost casually. In a voice like a low seductive hum, flirting and a little exploring, he asked, “Have we met, mon cher?”

She felt an overwhelming hopeless abundance of dread and excitement, and such naïve childish love so painfully reminiscent of what she felt when they danced together at the ball but there was something different now. It felt different, like a revision of the same script. It felt wrong, all of this felt wrong.

There was something different about him that just a new haircut and sharper cheekbones, something world-heavy and exhausting, though she supposed she could not blame him. She had changed so much too, aged more than she ever thought possible.

He did not seem aged to her, not the way that maturity was forced on her and her naivety ripped away, just tired. She supposed that his times had not been easy either.

“You are rather bewitching.” His voice was soft velvet, warm and enrapturing. “I have the well-remembered pleasure of seeing you at Naryshkins’ ball. I am sure I would remember the pleasure of being introduced to somebody as enchanting as you.”

“Na-Natalia Rostova, Natasha,” She reminded him, falling into a kind of daze before a sharp pain in her chest snapped her out of it. Had he forgotten her? “We have met, at the opera.”

“Oh?” He said, curiously. “Which one?”

“Do you not remember?” She asked. “Did you just – did you just forget all of it, like it was nothing?”

His brow twitched and the flirty smirk disappeared as he worried his lip between his teeth, “I don’t understand, what is it you are referring to?”

“ _You_ don’t understand? I don’t understand!” She cried out, getting to her feet. She gathered her coat in her arms, shaking her head. “Pierre didn’t say – you aren’t – you are in Petersburg, that is what everybody is saying.”

“Petersburg?” He asked. “No, I have – I have been here s-since-“

“And you did not tell me?” God, why was she being so emotional? She had thought that it was behind her, she could not hate him but she could – she _had_ moved on. “Not even a letter?”

“I do not know you,” He stressed, sounding disappointed and confused, a slight slur on the end of his words like he couldn’t be bothered to hide it.

“Are you drunk? Is this your idea of a joke?”

“I – no, there was –“ He made a frustrated sound, waving his hand choppily through the air before clenching his hand into a shaking fist. She could see him visible calm himself down. “An accident.”

“More of a mistake, I see now.”

“I fell – I – on the stairs?” His voice waivered unconfidently, unsure even as the words stumbled from his mouth. He pressed his forehead against his fist, eyes squeezed shut in concentration. “That’s not – no, that isn’t right.”

“What is…” She took a step forward cautiously on a creaky floorboard and his eyes flew open, startled. She stopped and then her eyes went wide as she got a good look at him – pale, shaking, and his unfocused eye. “Oh. _Oh_. You really do not remember?”

“Remember what?” He asked, striding across the room in hurried steps until he was in front of her, holding her arm in a tight grip as if she’d slip away. “There is something – Hélène, Fedya, they are keeping something from me. I know they are, am I forgetting?”

“I don’t know.”

“But I could never forget a face a beautiful as yours,” He breathed, releasing her arm to take her hand. “Something happened between us. Forgive me, mon cher, I cannot remember. Was it grand?”

“It was beautiful,” She told him softly, unable to stop herself as she caressed his handsome face. The haircut, upon close inspection, was hazardous, jagged like it was done with unskilled hands, and yet, it was charming. “It ended with ruin.”

She stopped when her fingers brushed against an angry scar beneath his hair, pulling back, “Has somebody hurt you?”

“I don’t know,” He whispered, taking the hand she pulled away and kissing the knuckles, pressing it to his cheek. “Were we in love?”

“I-“

His heart was in his throat, his breath halted as he waited for an answer. Anatole was so unsure about everything but so sure that he had once loved this beautiful girl. That those frightened eyes gazing into his, steely now with heartache and experience, they’d once been beautiful and youthful, that-

There was a grip on the back of his neck and then an arm around his waist, and he was pulled back so suddenly that he lost his balance completely. He yelped, struggled, and found his lower back pressed painfully into the corner of a desk, “P-P’rre?”

“What did you do?” He bellowed, breath the stench of alcohol and eyes a blazing fire. Anatole felt fear creep into his composure as big, big hands shook him by the collar. “What did you say to her?”

Anatole felt lost in an endless dark sea of confusion and saw no way out of it. He felt the pinprick of tears in his eyes, felt his heart seize, and his shaking legs give out beneath him. His words, a slurred stutter, “C-Come now, this-s stupid-“

A dark slender hand rested easily on Pierre’s shoulder, words whispered below the roaring in his ears, and Anatole found himself released. He nearly slid to the floor had it not been for Hélène rushing towards him as Natasha lead Pierre away. She could not leave, Anatole _needed_ her.

“Don’t,” He voiced slurred like it did when his emotions were running too high. “She – Natalie. _Natalie!_ ”

She turned back and he struggled to get off the table, “Is it possibly that I should never see you again, I-“

Pierre moved suddenly, hulking over Anatole with his huge frame in seconds before he was shoved back and Dolokhov stood between them. His jaw set in a fierce line, a challenge and an inch for his gun in his eyes.

Natasha pulled on Pierre’s arm, muttering calming words and shooting a sorry look to Anatole as she led him from the room.

She was his chance at happiness. No, his only chance at the truth and she was gone. “You can’t – Hélène, I need-“

“You need nothing!” Dolokhov roared, his arms still outstretched like he was expecting to stop a fight and then with unexpected speed, Anatole’s collar was clenched in them.

The fire in his eyes raged on and a trimmer in his hand wanted nothing more than to shake the idiot until he saw all the ways that messing with that little girl lead to his ruin. He shoved him when Anatole tried to break the hold and didn’t stop shoving him until his back was pressed against the desk, “Stop, Anatole! Stop this!”

“I need-“ He kicked out blindly but Dolokhov caught his foot under his own and pressed down until the limb was immobile. His other leg was jammed painfully between Dolokhov’s and the leg of the table. “F’ya!”

“Dolokhov,” Hélène said warningly but he ignored her, shaking her hand off his shoulder. “Fedya, stop-”

“No,” He hissed, shaking him a little to prove his point. “See reason, Anatole. She is nothing but trouble-“

“Nonsense, Natasha is-“

He shook him again, growling in frustration because he did not _want_ to do this all over again. Because he was shot in a pointless duel last time and Anatole had been beaten, because they got away lucky with the remains of their reputations and they would not be that lucky again. “Stop, Anatole, _stop_ this madness!”

“What, _don’t_ -“ Anatole flinched hard, his arms thrown up to cover his face as he shielded away from him.

Dolokhov froze, an almost vile image appearing in his head of the bear statue and blood, and how Anatole looked so small and broken when Hélène told him what had happened. He suddenly felt too big in his own skin, too strong. He felt disgusted, letting go of Anatole and backing away, “I – This is too far. I went – I’m sorry.”

Anatole rolled off the table as soon as there was nothing holding him there, landing hard on his hands and knees before stumbling to his feet and away from them. He put as much distance and furniture between them, his eyes wild and terrified, “You – _it was you!_ ”

“Don’t!” He hissed, backing into the bookshelf when Dolokhov stepped towards him. He grabbed at his hair in frustration before pointing accusingly at Dolokhov, “You _hit_ me. I remember – I remember it?”

“What? No, you don’t!” He exclaimed. “No, you don’t because I never touched you!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Anatole,” Hélène told him, taking half a step forward before the look she was given made her stop. She put her hands up in a slow surrender, “Brother, I would not allow-“

“You – you’re all _liars_ ,” He accused, taking up a frantic pace. Stalking to and fro, to and fro, more and more convinced in his conclusion with each step. “Nat-Natasha, _Natalie_ , I don’t remember. _Why_?”

He did not want to hear their reason, would not be convinced by their explanation so both Hélène and Dolokhov remained silent. It wasn’t until he stopped, taking an ornamental bear off the shelf that anybody spoke, “Anatole-“

He dropped it to the floor with a deafening thud and fixed Dolokhov with a calculated and upset stare, “I don’t – I _know_ Natalie, I have loved her once, I know that. I – it must be true because my heart feels as if it is. I don’t know how but you – you don’t like that. Right.”

It was not a question and Anatole did not treat it as such, continuing with growing heat in his voice and indignant fire in his eyes, “Was it not enough to take my sister?”

“I did not-“

“I am not deaf to the rumors,” He hissed. “I do not care, I – you wanted her, Natalie? That was it and you – did you _beat_ me because you wanted her?”

“You are confused, brother.”

“I never laid a hand-“ Anatole hand scrapped painfully along the scar on his head before balling his hair into a fist, a frustrated growl in his throat like an animal in a cage. “What would I want with a little girl, Anatole, make sense. I would not beat you, I am your best friend.”

“No, no, you’re not,” He hissed. “You – _both_ of you have been lying to me, holding me prisoner like – like some kind of – of – of…”

He trailed off into another growl, throwing his hands up in frustration, “You did this to me. You _ruined_ me.”

“You are not ruined, Anatole.”

“Yes, I am!” He snapped, pulling at his hair more. He waved a jagged hand through the air, “Leave. No. I – I will leave.”

“Anatole-“

“Hélène,” he spoke, an eerie sort of exhaustion crept upon his words. “Send word to Balaga, I will need the assistance of the troika driver in the morning. I am meant to be in Petersburg, yes? I will go.”

 

To say that Pierre was surprised to find a blade against his throat upon returning from seeing Natasha off to a troika would be to lie.

He had overstepped, he allowed the monster inside of him to overwhelm him. He only hoped that the damage done could be rectified, “How is Anatole?”

The blade cut into the skin just under his beard and Dolokhov growled, “He thinks I beat him.”

“What?”

Pierre was shoved backwards onto the floor and the blade was imbedded into the floor between his middle and ring finger when he tried to get up. Dolokhov crouched down in front of him, grabbing Pierre by the collar and pulling them face to face, “Fix. It.”

“How could he think-“

“Because he is confused!” Dolokhov seethed, shoving him back down. He stood, grabbing his sword from the wood it had stabbed. He paced angrily. “Because you are a coward!”

“It was not I that wished to keep what happened from him,” He hissed back, the monster too close to the surface. “I wanted to leave-“

“To run from your messes!”

“For you,” He shot back. “You love him, it is obvious. I was to give you the house, you and Hélène, and you said no, I wanted to rid myself of the burden-“

“Burden?” He baulked, stalking towards him. “From the _guilt!_ You have every opportunity to tell and yet, you didn’t. You are messing around with the Rostova girl-“

“The implication that-“

“-bringing her to this house, _allowing_ her this close when you know what would happen. You want him broken and you did it. You break everything, old man. You _are_ the ruin that befell us all.”

The allegation in Dolokhov’s words, the anger and the fire, that he was somehow the common dominator of all that has gone wrong settled heavy in Pierre’s chest. They were words from anger and desperation, a man in love and about to lose, but they rung with a truth Pierre did not want to hear.

It rang, he was the common thread between the Natasha, Audrey, and Anatole. He was the start, the cause, and the end of the ruin. He was not a good man.

“Fedya,” Hélène spoke for the first time, her arms were crossed at her chest, wrapping around herself in a hug she needed, shoulders drawn in with a vulnerability that was far too painful to see on a woman so confident and strong. Pierre didn’t look at her for long.  “Stop this.”

“No.” He did not even glance to her, checking the bullet in his gun. “I am an assassin, a good shot, and I have no qualms of ridding our lives of this monster.”

“ _Not_ in my house.”

“The house is his.”

Dolokhov’s eyes were hard and his hand steady, and he looked at Pierre with such hatred. There was no doubt in Pierre’s mind that this was the end. Fedya Dolokhov, the assassin, would kill Pierre in his own drawing room and he found, he really didn’t want to die.

The gun was raised and then a sweeping of green silk and black lace, Hélène was standing in front of him. Her voice sharp and commanding, the voice of her father, “Pierre, on your feet.”

“Hélène-“

“Countess,” She corrected Dolokhov, her eyes trained on him. “Countess Bezukhova. He is my husband, this is my house, and I will not allow you to dirty all our hands with his blood.”

“Move, Hélène.”

“Shoot him,” She challenged. “Shoot him but go through me. My brother hates me, I have nothing more to lose.”

“Anatole does not hate you,” He told her, gun a steady and forgotten thing. “He is just confused and angry.”

“I know,” She replied with ease. “And he does not hate you.”

“Yes, he does.”

“He is confused, and angry, and he is _Anatole_ ,” She stressed. “A stupid child too stuck in his own thoughts to see reason just yet. He will see that it is nonsense but he will not if you shoot Pierre.”

“I love you, Fedya,” She told him. “Anatole loves you-“

“He loves Natasha.”

“He _loves_ you, he is just – he’s stupid.” She rolled her eyes. “He does not understand the concept, just the lust and gaiety of beautiful people. He needs you but he will not – he will never see you as more than an assassin if you kill his friend.”

“He is _not_ his friend!”

“Let Anatole discover that on his own,” She said softly, her hand creeping forward until it rested against the barrel of the gun. “Give me the gun, please.”

It was a stupid, stupid thing to do, Dolokhov wanted to tell. A dangerous, reckless thing to do, to handle a gun in that manner, to stand in front of an angry assassin. Instead he said, “What if he does not forgive me?”

“He will,” She assured, taking the gun rather easily from his hand. She swooped down to pick up the sword as well, sitting them both aside before wrapping Dolokhov in a gentle hug. “He will, I swear to you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a bit wary about my portrayal of Natasha because I think what is most interesting about her is that her downfall essentially is that she sees the very best in everybody. I don't think that really goes away either, even in Pierre & Natasha she refused to call Anatole a bad man when he kind of screwed her over and bailed out of the consequences. I wanted to show that she still that person but also weathered, more grown up and more cautious. I hope I did her justice. 
> 
> And fun fact: The part with the snow in the last chapter was the first thing I wrote for this fic, everything else was just my justification for bringing snow into a house. 
> 
> Also, we are coming up on the end which is exciting and sad. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!!


	8. Chapter 8

There was a gun.

A silver pistol, polished to shine. Sat amid tea cups, fruit, and overfilled plates of cheeses and sausages, pale hands set it to spin. The only sound in the room that dared to be heard was the scrapping of wood before it settled to a stop, pointing at one of the two seated at the table.

Dolokhov stared down the barrel of the gun when he spoke, “Anatole.”

“Fyodor.”

Even Pierre, who snuck into the room only to make a cup of tea before sneaking off with his eyes down, looked up with curiosity and dread. Anatole lived for the production of it all, angry or not, he would set the scene.

He was in his military uniform, hair fixed to perfection and apprehension sat in his eyes as he stared down his nose to Dolokhov, “I challenge you.”

“A duel?” Hélène asked incredulous. “Anatole, you’re joking.”

“I can assure you, I am not.”

Dolokhov raised an eyebrow at him, “I have seen you with a gun, Anatole, you are likely to shoot yourself.”

“Are you afraid?” A challenge.  “Or do you have no honor to defend?” A taunt.

They’d been friends for as long as Dolokhov cared to remember and he knew all the petty reckless ways Anatole expressed his anger, but this was not one of them. He was playing Dolokhov on his own field, a bloody, dangerous field. It was the final act of injustice for his own injuries, shoot the assassin.

He knew Anatole and his stubbornness, and he knew that once he had an idea in his head than he was going to follow through with it, “You wish to be shot today, is that it?”

“Accept my challenge.”

“Anatole-“

“Pierre, stay out of this,” He snapped, eyes glued onto Dolokhov’s. “This is between the two of us.”

“Dolokhov will not-“

“I accept.”

“Fedya!” Hélène looked horrified and then shook Anatole’s arm. “Take it back, Anatole, he will kill you.”

“He has tried once before,” Anatole hissed, wrenching his arm away from her before grabbing the gun from the table. “He failed, he will do so again.”

Dolokhov waved a hand around halfheartedly, “If you wish to kill me than first, have breakfast with me. As old friends, Anatole.”

He considered it and seemed to accept the condition because he sat down with the gun beside him, still pointed at Dolokhov. He turned to the sicken expression on Pierre’s face and smile, “Do not worry, old man, I will not be harmed.”

“You are an idiot,” Hélène hissed under her breath to her brother. Dolokhov pretended not to hear. “He will throw his shot and if you harm him than you will live with that regret, I will make sure of it.”

“The only regret I have is befriending a monster.”

“Anatole-“

“Not now, Pierre,” He waved off. “I am starving.”

 

“I have never seen you with a gun,” Pierre noted for lack of something better to say, watching as Anatole loaded and unloaded the pistol for the fourth time. Nerves, he assumed, Anatole had never been a fighter. “Is it yours?”

“My service weapon, yes,” He hummed, loading the gun once more before pausing, “Well actually, a gift from Dolokhov. I lost my service weapon in a bet.”

Pierre was in no way surprised by that but still found himself incredulous, “You are going to shoot a man with a gun he gifted you?”

“The irony is justified, Dolokhov tried to kill me.”

“No, he didn’t.” 

“He is fierce in his career and his conviction, Pierre,” Anatole told him, emptying the gun. “Do not allow yourself to be deceived, he is a liar and an assassin.”

“He’s not – Anatole,” Pierre said, big hand falling over Anatole’s pale slender fingers, taking the bullet held between them and shucking it away. “This is a mistake.”

“It is justified,” He spat back, wrenching his hand away. He loaded the gun once more in a rush. “He stole my honor, he deceived me and he-“

“I hit you.”

There was a pause and then Anatole’s face cracked into a grin, he laughed, “You are a sad man, Pierre, you could not-“

“In my study,” He continued. “I received a letter from Marya Dmitriyevna that you tried to elope with Natasha. You ruined her life, her reputation and engagement. I saw red and I hit you, repeatedly, with the statue from my desk. Dolokhov never harmed you, he is your friend.”

“I…” Anatole trailed off and then laid a hand upon Pierre’s shoulder. “You are a good man, Pierre, but you cannot save Dolokhov by taking his crimes as your own. He must pay.”

There was an irony in hearing those words come from the mouth of a man that has never seen a problem that he couldn’t run away from. Pierre sighed at this thick-skulled child, “You are not understanding.”

“I understand, Pierre, I see more clearly than I ever have,” He stated. “I will kill him and – hey!”

Pierre’s hand was on the back of Anatole’s neck, pulling him to his feet. He caught ahold of one of his flailing arms, pinning it behind his back, and practically marched the young man from the room. His voice came out in a high and indignant squawk, “Pierre, let go!”

Anatole was behaving like a child and Pierre felt no reason to treat him as anything but as he nudged his feet to move with the toe of his boot. There was a faint blush working its way across his cheeks when his arm was hiked farther up his back until he protested, ‘That hurts!”

“Then stop struggling and walk,” He replied. “Quietly.”

When the only option was to face your problems, Anatole would do it with dignity and mild complaint. Pierre could see the way he weighed his lack of options and resigned himself to the task with straight shoulders and a set jaw. And, of course, dragged feet.

Pierre kicked the bottom of one of his boots as a warning to walk faster but only managed to cause him to stumble a little. He took himself to the floor just for the inconvenience of it all, cursing Pierre under his breath.

The commotion drew attention to the hall, Dolokhov followed a step behind Hélène as she approached them. She cocked her head to the side, “Pierre?”

“He did it to himself.”

“You kicked me!”

Dolokhov looked between the two of them with a clear look of disapproval on his face but he knew better than anybody the kinds of antics Anatole put them through. Pierre was not brave, angry, or drunk enough to try something now so he rolled his eyes, “What is happening?”

“Nothing to concern yourself with,” Anatole said, pulling himself to his feet. Rather it was subconscious or not, he took a step away from Pierre put Dolokhov between them. “A conversation between friends, you would not understand.”

“Do conversations with your _friends_ often end up with you on the floor?”

“I am sure it was a rousing conversation we had before you beat my skull in, Fyodor,” He replied crisply. “Was I on the floor then?”

“I wouldn’t know as I _didn’t do it_.” He rolled his eyes again before waving off the situation, “You are a fool, Anatole. I am ready when you are.”

“I am a fool? You are-“

“No, off you go,” Hélène cut him off, straightening out Anatole’s uniform before giving him a shove back into Pierre’s grasp. She stopped Pierre before he got too far, “Keep your anger in check.”

“I will.”

“And _enlighten_ my stupid brother,” She said, her eyes on Anatole. He rolled his eyes and she copied the gesture. “Do it before I am the next to hit that pretty little head.”

“I feel as if I’ve done something wrong,” Anatole admitted only after Pierre pulled him farther down the hall. “Everybody is angry with me.”

“That is a new feeling, is it not?” He asked. “Being aware of other people’s feelings?”

“I am only defending my honor,” He huffed. “They lied to me, he beat me. You shot Dolokhov for less.”

Pierre stopped, “You remember that?”

“In pieces,” He shrugged. “I am unsure what is memory and what is imagination. I was lead to believe a plethora of occurrence in which I received this injury, only to be kept in the dark of its true origin. I know, _no_ , I am positive that Dolokhov hit me.”

“That is your imagination,” He told him, opening the door that lead to his study. He gestured for Anatole to go down the stairs first. “You are creating fiction from half-thoughts and memory, it is a dangerous thing, Anatole.”

“I am not confused, Pierre, I know what…” He trailed off, being pushed into the chair at Pierre’s desk as Pierre moved to light a lantern. Despite the time that had passed, Pierre was too ashamed to let anybody down to scrub the blood from the carpet and the walls. The air reeked of its coppery scent, with booze, dust and grime.

Anatole stared down at the spot on the floor before looking back to Pierre expectantly, “What is it that you wish to speak about that could not be said in the drawing room?”

Pierre resisted the urge to groan. Anatole was a foolish stupid child but he was perspective the way Hélène was when he wanted to be. The problem was that, at this moment, he did not want to be.

He wanted retribution and he chose Dolokhov as the victim to his anger. It would be difficult to make him see that he was wrong.

“Do you know what this is?”

“A stain,” He shrugged his shoulders, putting his feet up on the desk and sinking into the chair. “Is that what you wanted to show me?”

“Yes.”

“I see it. Now can I go?”

Pierre’s hands curled into fist in his jacket pocket and he looked away, taking a shaky breath, “It is a stain of what?”

“It is too dark to be wine, I would guess blood,” He replied after a moment. “Is it mine?”

“It is.”

“Dolokhov ruined your study and my hair,” He stated plainly, eyes bouncing back to Pierre’s with a devilish smirk, “Is that why you shot him?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Anatole shrugged. “Very well, you should take another shot.”

“Anatole.”

“Pierre,” He sighed. “You will not convince me otherwise. I know what-“

Pierre growled but it lacked any true heat, swiping Anatole’s feet off the top of the desk and grabbing the front of his uniform. He shook him side to side until his face morphed from confusion to a degree of terror that would suffice, pulling him from the chair before throwing him back into it, “Do you remember this?”

“Pierre-“ Anatole stood from the chair indignantly, straightening out his uniform. “-Come now, this is stupid! What are you-“

Pierre tossed the chair aside in almost a mechanical fashion and Anatole startled, unable to brace himself for Pierre’s hands on his collar again, “What! What? Don’t!”

He was shoved down onto the desk, his head hitting the wall in a way that wasn’t painful just stunning before Pierre was upon him again. His hand was pressed against Anatole’s throat, his hand raised.

Anatole cried out, flinching hard, one arm extended out in front of his while the other dug fingernails into the hand at his throat. His breathing was stuttered, on the verge of tears. Pierre could feel his heart pounding against his hand, “Please, don’t.”

Pierre dropped the pretense and took a step back, allowing Anatole to curl in on himself on the desk while shielding his head with his arms. He breathed out evenly as Anatole’s stuttered, shaking the nerves from his hands before reaching into a drawer in the desk.

Anatole flinched when the drawer slammed shut. Pierre’s voice was soft when he spoke but it resulted in another flinch all the same, “Don’t be afraid.”

Pierre reached towards him but caught only air as Anatole practically fell from the desk onto the floor to get out of his reach, landing hard and dazed, “Don’t – don’t come closer.”

“I won’t. I shan’t be violent.”

“Why did you – what?” He breathed out. His eyes flickered around the room, to Pierre, to the stain, to the blood splatter on the wall and the bear statue overturned on the desk. “I don’t understand.”

“What do you remember?” Pierre asked, turning the chair back over and sitting down in it. In his hands were Natasha’s letters to Anatole, something he had not been able to bring himself to burn just yet.

“You were – you were there,” Anatole said, letting the silence stretch on. He pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes, “My head hurts. Nothing makes sense.”

“You have to remember, try.”

“I remember – I remember…” Anatole trailed off, his hands coming away from his face wet. He climbed awkwardly back to his feet, gesturing around the room in a frantic motion, “I need, uh, air. I have to-“

“Anatole,” Pierre stopped him, a hand on his arm that felt suddenly so large and so dangerous. Anatole appeared more like a child to him than he ever had before. He pressed the letters into his hand, “I’m sorry.”

A sharp nod and then Pierre was alone.

 

 

“He will kill you,” Hélène said suddenly, her eyes staring unblinking at the closed door of Pierre’s study. They’d heard the protest of moved furniture and the thud of a chair being dropped but Hélène would not allow herself to investigate it. “Anatole will kill you, Fedya.”

“He might.”

“You will let him.”

“He seems dead set on doing so,” Dolokhov responded, checking his gun over before sliding it back into its holster. He was dressed in his uniform, crisp and clean like a soldier ought to be. “You know how he is.”

“He will regret it.”

“Anatole does not regret anything,” He replied, coming up behind her and resting his chin on her shoulder. Hélène did not fight the arms that curled around her middle, leaning back into the touch. “What do you think is happening down there?”

“I fear to even guess, I only-“

Both of their mouths clamped shut at the sound of feet bounding up the stairs and the door being thrown open. Anatole looked wild, stumbling into the light. He was shaken, muttering under his breath. “Anatole?”

He ignored them, pacing almost drunkenly before bounding up the stairs. They heard a door slam from the floor above before either of them moved. Dolokhov sighed, “He will not wish to see me, you should go check on him.”

It was a rather easy feat. Anatole was pacing the length of his room when she opened the door, he barely paused to acknowledge her, “I don’t understand, Hélène, I don’t – everything is most perplexing.”

“I know, brother,” She told him, sitting on the unmade bed. She held her arms open, “Come, brother, you are working yourself into a state.”

“Can’t – it’s stuffy in here,” He told her even as he stopped in front of her. “Is that a symptom of – of the trauma?”

“Of panic, I assume, brother,” She replied, pulling him into a seat position, resting his head on her shoulder. She ran her hands softly over his shoulders and down the knots of his spine. “Hush, Anatole, let me help you.”

“How do I know you’ll be truthful?” He asked. It was a valid question, she supposed, but it still hurt. “I have been kept in the dark so much.”

“I am your sister, my loyalty is only to you, dear brother,” She told him softly, the tension was leaving his body as her hands worked over his muscles. “I will admit, I have not been doing a good job but I want to help you, allow me that.”

“Did I love Natasha?” He asked, waiting a beat for an answer that did not come. “In my heart, I feel as if I have always loved her but a different her, youthful and – and innocent.”

“She was, once,” Hélène finally spoke. “And you did, once, you planned to elope but it did not work out. That ruined her and you were – you were supposed to go to Petersburg.”

“Without you?”

“With Dolokhov, I suppose,” She replied, her voice soft and hypnotic and her hands so smooth and comforting against him. He had stopped shaking, she was grateful. “It never made it that far.”

“Because – because I was beat?”

“Yes.”

“By who?”

“Do you remember?” She asked curiously.

“I remember hands,” He spoke after a long pause, shifting from where his face was pressed into her neck to be able to see her eyes. He was watching for any kind of conformation or deceit. “Big hands, and the pain, and everything went black. Were you with me before?”

“I was.”

“I remember that,” He nodded to himself. “I was upset, I think.”

“You were.”

“Dolokhov never hurt me,” he said, a certain kind of despair in his voice. “Did he?”

She smiled sadly, kissing his forehead, “No, dear brother.”

“It was Pierre.” It was not a question. She did not answer him, just hugged him. “He pretended to be my friend during my recovery.”

“You asked for him,” She reminded him. “Relentlessly, much to my own dismay and he aided you in your recovery. I – it was my idea to not tell you what happened, it was mine alone.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you,” She told him, caressing his face gently in her hand. “And I was afraid that if you remembered than you’d try to find Natasha again, that you’d try – I did not want anything to happen to you. I want you safe, brother.”

“I am with you, Hélène, I could not be safer,” He said softly. “I think – I think these are Natasha’s letters. Pierre gave them to me. Will you read them to me?”

She took them, “Will you call off this ridiculous duel?”

He laid his head back onto her shoulder, pressing a kiss to the skin there and said, “After you read the letters.”

 

 

“Have you come to shoot me?”

The sun was set below the horizon, sleep clung to the air and his sense but Dolokhov’s voice was flat and dull. Anatole narrowed his eyes at it in distaste, “I do not wish to be spoken to in that tone.”

“Which tone would you like then, Prince?”

“You should be angry,” He told him. “It is a legendary sight, I have seen with my own eyes, and yet, you do not appear to be angry with me.”

“I am not,” Dolokhov spoke, pouring himself another glass. He did not drink from it. He filled another glass and slide it across the table, Anatole got the gist and walked farther into the room.

“I have committed a great slight against your character,” He spoke, not drinking from his glass either but squeezing it in his hands to lessen the shaking. “A horrid slight, you should be angry.”

Anatole does not apologize and he would not start now but this, this acknowledgement that he was wrong was more than Dolokhov had ever seen before. He expected forgiveness because he wanted it and he would get it because Dolokhov had never disappointed, “You were confused.”

“I was wrong in my own mind, I do not – Hélène helped me sort through what was real,” He told him, fidgeting in his seat before he had to stand. “You are my friend, Fedya.”

“I know.”

Anatole nodded once, “I will throw my shot, I do not want to hurt you.”

For the first time since he entered the room, Dolokhov’s eyes were not the critical eyes of a soldier but that of his childhood friend, “I am in no mood to get my affairs in order, let’s call the duel off altogether. Drink more, Anatole.”

“There is a war going on,” Anatole noted, something light in his voice like the weight of the world was lifted from his shoulders. The dance of the Kuragins, all was well now.

Dolokhov nodded, a smile playing along his lips, “And we live to love another day. Drink with me, my friend.”

 

 

Pierre was an intellectual and Anatole was a lover, the battlefield and its violent tactics were of no use for them. A duel would not solve the ravine of problems between them, just shed more blood.

There had been an apology offered, heartfelt and sincere, and it shattered like ice against the floor. Anatole kept his gun in a shaking grip out in front of him but it was only a precaution, “You – do not come closer to me.”

“I will not,” Pierre replied, arms listless at his side. “I will not hurt you and I do not wish to die, Anatole, please lower your weapon.”

“I almost died,” He stated even as he sat the gun within reach. There was nothing held in his voice, no anger, no heartbreak, just…acceptance. Cold acceptance and eyes unnaturally hard in a face that had once been carefree. “You hurt me.”

“I know,” He sighed. “I know and I regret that it had been at my hand. I regret that I – I had to make you relive that in my study to-“

“I challenged Dolokhov, I wanted to kill my friend,” He cut off. “You lied to me and I-“

“I know,” Pierre breathed. “If there is anything I can-“

“Money.” Ah, there it was. Old habits die hard and Anatole would always be Anatole. There was something comforting in that.

Pierre felt laughter bubble into his chest but did not dare allow it to be vocalized, “Money?”

“Not a loan, a payment, a large settlement for the…damages you caused me,” Anatole spoke. “And – and I wish for a letter to be delivered, you do that for me.”

“Yes, of course,” He said but stopped when he was handed the letter. “Anatole.”

“Do not go back on your word,” He warned him, his eyes serious. “You owe me, Pierre.”

 

 

Anatole had not looked up when he heard footsteps nor when there was a soft knock against the doorframe, busy packing away his violin and sheet music into its case. He hummed, “All is well, mon cher?”

“I am much better than I have been, thank you.”

At the sound of a voice so melodic and sweet, Anatole’s head snapped up. His bow falling to the floor from numb hands, “Oh. Natasha?”

“Hello,” She greeted, not moving from where she stood in the door. Her arms hanging lifelessly by her side in an almost nervous manner. She had not shed her coat, she did not plan to stay long. “Are you well, Anatole?”

“I am better than I have been,” He repeated her phrasing. “I feared that you had not received my letter.”

“Pierre delivered it to me,” She explained. “Though, I do believe it was a postponed delivery and I admit that I was unsure if I should visit. You are leaving?”

“For Petersburg,” He nodded to the bag still half-packed on the bed. “Dolokhov is accompanying me, I cannot stay here anymore. I do believe that I owe it to you to tell you this much.”

She nodded but said nothing else so he spoke, “I would ask if you would come with me.”

“Anatole.”

“I know now that it can never be,” He said with much regret in his voice. He gave her a smile, something small and genuine, that made her look away. “I am horribly aware of the wrongs I’ve caused you, it would pain me to take it back if I could but I would.”

“No,” She said, her eyes meeting his straight on, gazing into them. “No, it was a beautiful moment, Anatole, I wish to remember it as such.”

He nodded, turning back to his packing in an odd display of vulnerability. He reached under a pile of clothing, pulling the bundle of letters out, “I suppose I should return these to Pierre but I believe that they are yours, mon cher. I wish you to have them.”

“My letters?”

“I understand that I loved you once,” He told her. “I don’t remember all of it but my heart is flooded with happiness when I read your letters. They are as beautiful as the woman that composed them.”

She blushed, “Anatole.”

“It was fierce but brief affair,” He breathed out in a rush, overcome with the feeling it dredged up and the fear of how it ended. “When I gaze into your eyes, I know that they are not the same eyes as before. I know that my eyes are different now, that we are different now. It would not be the same.”

She nodded understanding and asked because he _was_ different now, aged in the way she felt, “Did you find out who hurt you?”

The corner of his mouth flickered up and he nodded, “I have.”

“It is why I have to go,” He admitted truthfully. “I do not have it in my heart to find forgiveness at this moment and I do not want to grow old with bitterness so I must go, for now.”

“It was Pierre,” She guessed, his lack of response was all the answer she needed. Her eyes frosted with something cold and then melted like ice in summer, she was disappointed. “Was I the reason?”

“I believe, I was the reason,” He told her, bouncing on the balls of his feet uncomfortably. There was a forced joke on his tongue, it fell a little flat but neither of them acknowledged it, “I have on good words that I can be quite difficult.”

“You did not deserve that.”

“No, I don’t think I did,” He agreed. “You did not deserve what happened to you either.”

She nodded, agreeing, “Will you be careful, Anatole?”

“Dolokhov will do his absolute best to see to it.”

“Will you be happy?”

He thought carefully about her question before answering it, a small smile on his lips, “I will have Dolokhov, I believe I can find happiness in that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole chapter was a master class in writing yourself into a corner eight different times. By the end of it, I was ready to shoot Anatole myself. 
> 
> Thank you everybody that has taken the time to read this! I am so eternally grateful for all of the comments, kudos, and bookmarks. I hope you have had as much joy reading as I did writing.
> 
> Thank you!


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